TEACHING AIDS AT LOW COST

Many hospitals, health centres and clinics in these countries
are desperately short of books and teaching materials and help provided by TALC
can enable doctors and health workers to make the right diagnosis and provide
the right treatment, resulting in the saving of life and the alleviation of an
enormous amount of pain and suffering.

Material provided by TALC, as well as covering most aspects of
primary health care, also covers surgery, anaesthetics, nutrition and other
topics at district hospital level.

Among the most popular books are, Clinical Tuberculosis,
the Strategies for Hope series and the Child-to-Child Readers.

TALC is also in the forefront of the battle against AIDS and
fulfils a big demand for books and slides on this subject.

On the equipment side TALC is interested in low cost methods of
weighing and measuring, children such as the Direct Recording Scale which
involves mothers in plotting the charts of their own children, and enables them
to understand, even if illiterate, the meaning of a growth curve.

On the teaching side, flannelgraphs, which consist of pictures
printed onto material with a rough surface have proved very popular.

The idea of forming TALC came to child care specialist Professor
David Morley when he was lecturing in 1966 at London University and was asked by
overseas students for slides which they wanted to take back to their own
countries to use for lectures.

He started making sets of slides with a duplicate commentary to
accompany each set and quickly discovered that there was more demand than he
could cope with, so he got people living near his home to help and as demand
continued to grow TALC became an official charity and branched out into books
and teaching aids.

Since it started TALC has distributed 5½ million slides,
probably more than any other organisation. Today it employs over 20 full and
part time staff and supplies over 80,000 books and booklets, 10,000 slide sets
and a large amount of teaching equipment every year.

Packing and distribution of slides and books has taken place
largely from the homes of TALC workers in St Albans, thus reducing overhead
costs and allowing the provision of teaching material at a fraction of similar
commercial organisations.

TALC is advised by staff in the Centre for International Child
Health in the Institute of Child Health, London University. It also works
closely with Appropriate Health Resources Technology Action Group (AHRTAG) and
the Child-to-Child programme and is a source for publications sold by both these
groups.

Those interested in further details should write for a free list
of books and other material available to: